Tuesday, August 14, 2012

When you exaggerate something, you are in effect putting
your thumbprint on it.To extend the
metaphor to a more acute contemporary focus, you are investing the person,
place, thing, event with a barcode of your own scale of variation from reality.

Things begin to get dicey when you reckon your own vision against
reality or, indeed, your vision against someone else’s vision.Idiosyncrasy creeps farther into the picture
when you consider that fiction, which is supposed to be a depiction or
evocation of life more or less has to be bigger than life in order for readers
to be at all interested in the depiction.

Characters have to be bigger than life even when they are
represented as being average.John may
be an average guy, but if we look closely, we’ll see that somewhere along the
way it was necessary for us or for his creator to have exaggerated his
averageness.John was more average than
Fred, who was pretty average to start out, but has now lost something in the
comparison.Someone from the sidelines
may argue if you claim John is smarter than Fred, accusing you of
exaggeration.

Your best approach is to dramatize a scene or two in which
John and Fred are opponents in two or more different contests, something as
dissimilar, say, as chess, where John more often beats Fred, and poker, where
Fred is more likely to be tucking away sheaves of money that was once
John’s.This puts us back to arguing
which requires the greater intelligence, chess or poker.Are they not, in fact, representative of
differing types of intelligence at work?

And here is yet another potential for mischief:Do you in fact exaggerate more when you are
describingfrom Reality awful events or
pleasant ones?

Questions abound when the subject of exaggeration
arises.Such questions focusing on a
standard of representation almost impossible to measure with any reliable
response.

All right, your longtime pal, Leonard Tourney, is six feet
four.Being a scant six three yourself,
you are aware of Leonard being the taller, thus it is no exaggeration to say he
is taller than you.The only potential
for exaggeration there would be if someone were to say he was considerably
taller than you.

At last, we’ve got some standards to work with.Two or more things—the number is important
because of the potential for immediate verification of the
representation—demonstrate similarities or dissimilarities.

Question:How alike
are peas in a pod?

Perhaps after hand shelling a thousand pods, you’d have a
more informed notion.When, after
observing of two things,that they were
as alike as two peas in a pod, you might be challenged with the not illogical
question of how alike peas in a pod are in actuality, you could with all éclat
present yourself as a judge on the basis of having investigated the peas in a
thousand pods.Silly may be an exaggerated
judgment to make on someone who would set himself as an authority on peas in a
pod, particularly with such a relatively small n-sampling.

You mean a great deal to me.

How much?

Lots.

Can you be more specific?

Thus a call for an exaggeration.

There are critical moments when, after asking for and
receiving an estimate of a cost of a particular service or maintenance, we are
presented with what we consider an exaggerated reality of a fee.When we take a vehicle in for a regular
servicing, even though we tend to have some idea of what the charge will be, we
are on some inner alert for the news of a larger-than-quoted fee.On the other hand, let’s say the original
estimate is $175 and the actual invoice is, say, $127.50, we are suspicious
that something has beenoverlooked.The final bill should be more than the
estimate rather than less.

You are a firm believer in creating your own landscape in
your narrative, even though it may be a city you know, a particular type of
institution, or a specific local.These
say nothing of characters, which you may have based on actual individuals you
know, but who are definite exaggerations to fit the narrative.Your descriptions, at the least, are thematic
exaggerations, set into place with the glue of your attitudes and experiences.

The standard jokefor
the city where you now live is: “Many old people come to Santa Barbara—to visit
their parents.”Directly north of Santa
Barbara is a former lemon-growing area, now an urban and suburban buffer
between Santa Barbara and the sprawl the university has taken, and the college
town, Isla Vista, that has evolved.The
joke of this town—Goleta—is:What’s the
difference between Goleta and yogurt?The answer:Only one has a living
culture.

These are exaggerations meant as snarky elitism.Your current joke for Santa Barbara,
certainly parts of it, is:A place where
everyone feels more entitled than you.

Exaggerated as this may be—and in many ways it is
exaggerated—nevertheless, it is the theme of your next novel.

When your shins get banged too often by a shopping cart, maneuvered
by a texting shopper, you switch markets, or you write a novel about
entitlement.

Preface

These are notes, arguments, and attempts to resolve any lingering indecision about works in progress, things I have observed, books and stories I have read, things I wish I had done, and things I wish I had not done. They are in effect the kinds of notes I put in bottles at the beach as a kid, but this time the hoped for reader is the me of the future, browsing here for the energy and vision that got these notes down in the first place.